Rebrickable has been so kind as to provide us with data on their inventories and all related attributes (available here). So we decided to take some time to practice our visualization skills on real data (as well as maybe find interesting patterns in the data)
Rebrickable is a company, therefore we would expect it to grow with time (assuming it is successful). But does the data confirm this? Even though we don’t have numbers on the revenue of this company :(, we can at least see how many sets were put out with time:
(plot is interactive, so feel free to inspect the data at your leisure)
As we can see, the growth in the number of released sets has been
almost exponential through the years. (One possibility, however, is that
many of the new sets each year are just “updated” versions of older sets
- and the possibility of “update”s accumulate with years)
Up until
about 1980 the median number of parts in sets has been quite volatile,
but after that has been predominantly in the range of
(20, 40]
Of course, sets are built out of parts. Luckily, Rebrickable divides parts into neat categories according to their use. And we wanted to check whether resources are being unnecessarily spent on diversifying colors.
Unfortunately, we see that the distribution is quite logical:
Minifig Accessories, Bricks, …)Pneumatics, Mechanical, …)Millions of people around the world build sets specifically because of the theme (perhaps their favorite show or movie). So we decided to see which themes have been most abundant in the inventories of Rebrickable and when did they first appear!
| Theme | Avg_Num_Parts | Year_Introduced |
|---|---|---|
| FIRST LEGO League | 490.269663 | 2000 |
| Educational and Dacta | 396.098214 | 1985 |
| Star Wars | 261.933875 | 1999 |
| Super Mario | 185.085714 | 2020 |
| 9V | 157.840000 | 1991 |
| Bionicle | 61.377012 | 2001 |
| Mixels | 41.289256 | 2014 |
| WeDo | 26.675676 | 2008 |
| DC Super Heroes | 7.789474 | 2020 |
| Series 19 Minifigures | 6.350000 | 2019 |
(The table was introduced due to plotly not cooperating well with the plot above)